Henry James - two difficult novels

On a recent break I decided to set myself the task of reading one of Henry James longest novels - The Tragic Muse - and one of his most obscure - The Sacred Fount. The first I had once read almost fifty years ago whilst on holiday in Ireland, but could remember nothing about it. The second I had been saving for years like some dark-flavoured liqueur reserved for a special occasion. Both proved difficult - but for quite different reasons.

The Tragic Muse is James exploring his love affair with the theatre and what it means to be an artist by profession. Miriam Rooth is an ambitious actress who claws her way to success by hard work and a belief in her own possibilities. She is counterpoised by Nick Dormer, a successful member of Parliament, who gives up his glittering career to become a painter. The problem with the novel is that it's quite long at nearly 200,000 words.

The Sacred Fount is much shorter - but difficult because it's not quite clear what's going on in the story. The narrator is a guest at a Downton Abbey-like country mansion weekend party. He realises that some of his fellow guests are engaged in undercover sexual liaisons, and he sets out to discover who is involved. But he will only use methods of psychological interpretation. The results are equally baffling for him and the reader in this 'detective story without a crime - and without a detective'.

Full tutorial notes and study guides here:

The Tragic Muse

The Sacred Fount

Henry James - master of the short story

Henry James is well known as the author of magnificent novels such as The Portrait of a Lady, Washington Square, and The Wings of the Dove. But at the same time as writing over twenty full-length novels he also produced over a hundred short stories. And it has to be said that most of them are not so short - some of them stretching to the form of novellas or even short novels - such as The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers. His collection of the Complete Tales runs to twelve handsome volumes - and if you ever spot volumes nine and ten in the Rupert Hart-Davis hardback edition of 1963 I will pay you good money for them. Coming forwards half a century I've spent much of this year writing tutorials on the lesser-known tales, and can report that there are some undiscovered gems amongst them and hardly a dud in sight. There are still a couple to be finished off, but one hundred and three, with story synopses, study resources, critical commentaries, illustrations, and suggestions for further reading are now available here.

Ghost Stories

Henry James is best known as a novelist, but he was also a prolific writer of short stories - or 'tales' as he called them. He wrote over a hundred, and he was particularly fond of ghost stories, which enjoyed something of a vogue at the end of the nineteenth century. His most famous is The Jolly Corner, which is the story of a man who returns to New York after living for thirty years in Europe. He visits his old family home, which he has inherited, and wonders what would have become of him if he had stayed. Wandering round the old house late at night, he gets the feeling that his 'other self' is waiting for hi. Then he finds a room with the door open ... I won't spoil the rest of the story for you.

He could even write ghost stories which are amusing, if not actually funny. In The Third Person two elderly spinsters inherit an old house in Kent. They are so enthusiastic about its antiquity they convince themselves it must be haunted, and start to compete with each other for sightings of the resident ghost. And Sir Edmund Orme even has a benevolent ghost whose purpose is to protect bachelors from being ill-treated by a woman, as he once was. However, he does manage to scare her mother to death.

More Tales by Henry James

Devotees of the classic short story (and it's more relaxed cousin, the 'tale') should head over pronto to our Henry James sub-site. We've just posted analyses of a number of his greatest stories. As it happens they're all to do with writers and their relationships with readers, the public, and posterity - things which were clearly on the mind of the Master as he approached the climax of his career. The Death of the Lion is a sad tale of a novelist who is swallowed up by his own fans. The Coxon Fund is almost its opposite: a writer and great talker manages to secure a grant from a rich patroness, but then produces nothing for the remainder of his life. The Middle Years is about an author who feels he is about to produce his best work, but needs 'another shot at life' in order to achieve it. And The Figure in the Carpet is a famous literary puzzle: an author claims that there's a hidden pattern in his work and sets critics on a quest to detect it. But he dies before revealing what it is. Every one of these stories is a first class work of art, from a great novelist. Henry James may not be the easiest of writers: his sentences tend to be long and his syntax complex. But he repays attention. Read these tales, and you'll want to read more.

Print on Demand

I bought one of those Print on Demand books from Amazon the other day - Volume 9 from the 12 volume set of the Complete Tales of Henry James which was missing from my collection. For some unknown reason volumes 9 and 10 from the wonderful Rupert Hart-Davis edition are now very rare. PoD offers a service of producing rare, classic, or out-of-print texts in a basic paperback format in small quantities - including single copies.

It served its purpose in delivering the text in a more-or-less readable form at a reasonable price (given the rarity of the volume). But it left a lot to be desired. I imagine it has been scanned using optical character recognition (OCR) and formatted using some automated process.

There are no details about the origin of the text; no critical apparatus or footnotes; no introduction, bibliography, or further reading; and no details of any editorial process. There are almost no page margins either. The text is crammed into the page space with no concessions to the reader's visual comfort.

Is the text accurate? Well, it's hard to tell without the definitive version to make a comparison, but I noticed lots of scrappy errors. Foreign expressions are not italicised; m-dashes have been converted to double hyphens; there are missing words, misspellings, and double full stops; and text which is conversation has been rendered as if it was part of the narrative. There are absolutely no concessions to bibliographic aesthetics. New stories begin half way down a page.

These digitised publishing solutions may perform a useful function: better a print-on-demand text than none at all. But eTexts may be close behind. The deficiencies in what's available demonstrate what added value we expect and get from a well-produced and properly edited edition.

Short Stories by Henry James

For devotees of the short story, we've just launched several explanatory guides to the work of Henry James. Actually, the stories are not short by modern standards, but they have the distinction of all being very good. The Best in the Jungle is quite well known. It's about a man who has a presentiment that something momentous lies ahead for him in life, but he doesn't know what it will be. Not so well known, but amazingly contemporary in its relevance is The Papers which concerns, would you believe, journalists making up stories for newspapers to generate publicity for would-be celebrities. Four Meetings is an almost tragic tale of a gullible American schoolteacher who has a dream of seeing Europe but is conned out of it by an unscrupulous relative. Two stories are about women in relation to ships. In Pandora a spirited young American woman tweaks the nose of a young German diplomat who she meets on a cross-Atlantic liner, whilst in The Patagonia a similar young woman throws herself overboard rather than meet the man to whom she is going to be married. The Bench of Desolation is not nearly so gloomy as its title suggests, Fordham Castle is a story of an advanced form of social climbing - by pretending to be somebody else - and Daisy Miller is another of his acknowledged masterpieces about Americans in Europe, with the eponymous Daisy breaking social taboos at a cost to herself. Every one a gem, and a tribute to an author known to other writers simply as 'The Master'.

Henry James in Andalucia

Just enjoying another reading 'week' here in Mijas, and I have to report that my production quotient has been higher than normal because of unusually bad weather. Some days it's been impossible to move out of the house. But with my trusty book bag alongside, I've managed to get to grips with Daisy Miller (so to speak) plus her fictional sisters in his stories Pandora and The Patagonia. There've also been excursions into boys-stuff Joseph Conrad, with The Secret Sharer and The Shadow-Line. More to come too from Virginia Woolf and Thomas Hardy - but that will depend on the weather.

The Ambassadors - study guidance notes

Lambert Strether is a middle-aged American widower who is engaged to Mrs Newsome, the widow of a wealthy manufacturer. She dispatches him on an errand to bring back her son Chadwick (Chad) who is living in Paris, so that he can take his place at the head of the family business. She also fears that he has fallen under someone’s bad influence, presumably a woman. Strether makes the journey, and on the way meets Miss Goostrey, a spirited American woman who has lived in Paris for years and offers to act as his ‘guide to Europe’. He discovers that Chad has improved and become more confident and sophisticated ... more >>

The Diary of a Man of Fifty [Henry James]

Henry James was a prolific writer of stories, in addition to his many great novels. There are over a hundred in the twelve volumes of the Collected Tales - many of them so long that they become 'long short stories' or even novellas, as in the case of The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers. The three stories in this collection are fairly typical - long, quite complex, and not at all seeking brevity to make their point. In fact the tale which gives the volume its title is one of James' least-known stories, and wasn't even included in the Collected Tales. It's also rather unusual, because it's written in the form of a journal. James normally likes to keep the narrative and the point of view tightly under his own control in the form of a first person or omniscient third person narrator... Read more >>

more HENRY JAMES materials

Nyons - Haute Provence

Dear Phil and Diana - You were kind enough to invite us to share your Provencale home for my latest reading week in late May. In fact it's been almost a non-reading week - because the only texts I got through were on the Ryanair flight between Liverpool's misbegotten John Lennon airport and Nimes, on a trip to your beautiful little town of Nyons in Haute Provence. Still, I was happy to re-visit Henry James in his best late-flowering period, as he played with the unreliable narrators in the ghost stories 'The Friends of the Friends' and 'The Turn of the Screw'.

But the week was culturally and geographically quite overwhelming in my exposure to French culture and the topography of that region. Back in Manchester, I can remember all the details of the stone-work of the steps, the gulleys and crevises in the pavements, and of course the arches of the medieval town centre in Nyons; the colours of the stone; and the textures of the pathways and handrails one clutched whilst navigating its ancient streets.

I have retraced all the journeys we made using Google maps - and can confirm that no, the Eygues does not flow into the Ouveze. That mountainous scenery is a bit scary, but it's also awe-inspiring. To be able to stand on the summit of the Col d'Eye and look out over a whole series of mountain ranges and valleys stretching for miles and miles is truly breathtaking. I would even brace myself for one of Phil's white-knuckle drives to see it all again.

Your country-living style is quite different from ours - but I loved the way everything was so comforting - from the puffy-plump bed to the capacious armoirs, the lavish kitchen, and the multi-level patios and garden.

Your town itself is a delight - authentic, old, graceful, unpolluted by vulgarity, and poised between mountains and the plain which gives you the best of both Provences. If you can walk downhill in five minutes to buy a freshly-baked bagette, goat's cheese, local olive oil, and the New York Herald Tribune - you've got it made.

It made me seriously re-consider my decision to buy in Spain. There, we have the same conveniences (at the cost of some local tat) and there is plenty of ancient history nearby (including even Roman ruins) - but you have a lushness of landscape and vegetation which must be almost the envy of the world.

I enjoyed every minute of our visit there, and quite apart from hoping that I might be invited back again, my sojourn has inspired me to reconnect more seriously with mainland European culture. That's something of which I imagine The Master would approve.

The Ghost Stories of Henry James

Towards the late period of his long and astonishingly productive life, Henry James wrote a number of mystery or ghost stories. In these he combined his skills at controlling narrative and point of view with his penchant for puzzling and ambiguous situations. This collection contains some of the most famous tales - 'Sir Edmund Orme', 'Owen Wingrave', 'The Friends of the Friends', and his best-known shorter work, 'The Turn of the Screw'. They all deal with ghosts (or the supernatural) in a non-conventional manner, in that they hold a narrative interest whether you find the ghosts believable or not. And none of them rely on any conventional notions of spookiness or ghastly apparitions for their ... Read more >>

more HENRY JAMES materials

The Turn of the Screw

There was an excellent production of Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw on BBC Radio 3 tonight. The opera raises a number of interesting questions about the relationship and differences between music and literature. Britten obviously chose the Henry James novella because it chimed comfortably with his interest in the theme of violated childhood innocence. And the music is magnificent. But the problem is that his version is an interpretation which conflicts with literary evidence. For in the opera, Miss Jessel and Peter Quint actually have singing parts - whereas in the text of the novella there is no evidence that they exist at all. Everything is mediated via the feverish imagination of the governess. There is no external evidence for the existence of the two ghost-like figures at all - only what the governess herself relates. You need to read very carefully to perceive this instance of the 'unreliable narrator', But the truth is that it's the governess who oppresses and tyrannises Flora and Miles - to the extent that they actually complain about her, and ultimately she frightens Miles to death. Read it again if you don't believe me.